One or more aspects relate, in general, to processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to improving such processing.
Applications executing within a processor of a computing environment control the behavior of the processor. The applications are created using programming languages which are designed to communicate instructions to the processor. There are various types of programming languages, and each language may use one or more types of encodings to represent data.
For example, scaled decimal integers (also known as scaled binary coded decimals/scaled BCD) are a common data type in many COBOL and PL/I programs, as well as in DB2 database management systems. A scaled BCD number is a BCD number plus a format descriptor (n.k), where the BCD number is interpreted to have n digits before the decimal point and k digits after the decimal point (i.e., with k fraction digits), or a decimal integer to be multiplied by 10−k.
Performing addition and subtraction on scaled BCD data with the same k-parameter is straight forward because the data is correctly aligned and the result has the same number of fraction digits. Division is more complex because the integer divide of two numbers delivers the integer part of the quotient. The k fraction digits are missing.
For example, if:                A=4444.44, B=3333.33, Q=0001.333        
A normal integer divide delivers the quotient Q=1, but not the fraction digits. Further, conventional code for performing a BCD divide operation can be fairly complex, requiring a lengthy sequence of operations.